Deleting Ext3 (Journalized Ext2) partitons
 

I installed Mandrake 8.2 and have now decided I want to get rid of it so I don't destroy my windows install accidently. It's taking up 20GB and I'm running low on hard drive space so I need to remove it. I used Parition Magic 7 to make the free space on my hard drive in the first place, but it won't do anything to Ext3 partitions, it thinks they're Ext2 and gets errors trying to delete or format them. Also, I am using WinXP pro. How can I delete the partitons to reclaim the space without destorying my other data? Is using FDISK safe? I just don't want to spend money on the solution.

EDIT: Using the Linux boot disk that it made when I installed the boot fails, so I can't use Linux to delete the partition.

Do you have a Win2K boot diskettes set, if not get it from a friend or neibourgh who owns a favor. With boot diskettes on hands pop the first one in boot from floppy (change boot sequence in BIOS if you have to), after you done with first one pop the second on and so on - to make a tale shorter boot the system off these floppies at the end it will ask you where do you want to install win2k (but you won't be installing it if you don't want to), and there will be a list of all your current partitions, just select linux partitions to delete and format the resulting free space into FAT32 or NTFS whichever suits you better.

I'm not sure the problems are caused by PM mistaking ext3 for ext2, because ext3 doesn't add anything to the file system that stops ext2 code from handling it (you can even mount an ext3 partition safely as an ext2 partition, the journal is just ignored).

Alex

I'd like to note that it also gets errors on the Linux swap partition.

If I can use w2k's FDISK in it's set-up, could I use WinXP Pro Corprate's FDISK or installer's FDISK. I don't think I could easily get Win2k stuff because all my friends have WinXP.

I would like to note that I just used the WinXP installer to remove the partitions and I'm about to use Partition Magic to reclaim the space by putting it into my Windows partitions... next time I try Linux I'm putting it on a separate hard drive!